At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

The plateau of pitch now widened out, and the whole ground looked like an asphalt pavement, half overgrown with marsh-loving weeds, whose roots feed in the sloppy water which overlies the pitch.  But, as yet, there was no sign of the lake.  The incline, though gentle, shuts off the view of what is beyond.  This last lip of the lake has surely overflowed, and is overflowing still, though very slowly.  Its furrows all curve downward; and it is, in fact, as one of our party said, ‘a black glacier.’  The pitch, expanding under the burning sun of day, must needs expand most towards the line of least resistance, that is, downhill; and when it contracts again under the coolness of night, it contracts, surely from the same cause, more downhill than it does uphill; and so each particle never returns to the spot whence it started, but rather drags the particles above it downward toward itself.  At least, so it seemed to us.  Thus may be explained the common mistake which is noticed by Messrs. Wall and Sawkins 141 in their admirable description of the lake.

‘All previous descriptions refer the bituminous matter scattered over the La Brea district, and especially that between the village and the lake, to streams which have issued at some former epoch from the lake, and extended into the sea.  This supposition is totally incorrect, as solidification would have probably ensued before it had proceeded one-tenth of the distance; and such of the asphalt as has undoubtedly escaped from the lake has not advanced more than a few yards, and always presents the curved surfaces already described, and never appears as an extended sheet.’

Agreeing with this statement as a whole, I nevertheless cannot but think it probable that a great deal of the asphalt, whether it be in large masses or in scattered veins, may be moving very slowly downhill, from the lake to the sea, by the process of expansion by day, and contraction by night; and may be likened to a caterpillar, or rather caterpillars innumerable, progressing by expanding and contracting their rings, having strength enough to crawl downhill, but not strength enough to back uphill again.

At last we surmounted the last rise, and before us lay the famous lake—not at the bottom of a depression, as we expected, but at the top of a rise, whence the ground slopes away from it on two sides, and rises from it very slightly on the two others.  The black pool glared and glittered in the sun.  A group of islands, some twenty yards wide, were scattered about the middle of it.  Beyond it rose a noble forest of Moriche fan-palms; 142 and to the right of them high wood with giant Mombins and undergrowth of Cocorite—a paradise on the other side of the Stygian pool.

We walked, with some misgivings, on to the asphalt, and found it perfectly hard.  In a few yards we were stopped by a channel of clear water, with tiny fish and water-beetles in it; and, looking round, saw that the whole lake was intersected with channels, so unlike anything which can be seen elsewhere, that it is not easy to describe them.

Conceive a crowd of mushrooms, of all shapes, from ten to fifty feet across, close together side by side, their tops being kept at exactly the same level, their rounded rims squeezed tight against each other; then conceive water poured on them so as to fill the parting seams, and in the wet season, during which we visited it, to overflow the tops somewhat.  Thus would each mushroom represent, tolerably well, one of the innumerable flat asphalt bosses, which seem to have sprung up each from a separate centre, while the parting seams would be of much the same shape as those in the asphalt, broad and shallow atop, and rolling downward in a smooth curve, till they are at bottom mere cracks, from two to ten feet deep.  Whether these cracks actually close up below, and the two contiguous masses of pitch become one, cannot be seen.  As far as the eye goes down, they are two, though pressed close to each other.  Messrs. Wall and Sawkins explain the odd fact clearly and simply.  The oil, they say, which the asphalt contains when it rises first, evaporates in the sun, of course most on the outside of the heap, leaving a tough coat of asphalt, which has, generally, no power to unite with the corresponding coat of the next mass.  Meanwhile, Mr. Manross, an American gentleman, who has written a very clever and interesting account of the lake, 143 seems to have been so far deceived by the curved and squeezed edges of these masses, that he attributes to each of them a revolving motion, and supposes that the material is continually passing from the centre to the edges, when it ‘rolls under,’ and rises again in the middle.  Certainly the strange stuff looks, at the first glance, as if it were behaving in this way; and certainly, also, his theory would explain the appearance of sticks and logs in the pitch.  But Messrs. Wall and Sawkins say that they observed no such motion; nor did we: and I agree with them, that it is not very obvious to what force, or what influence, it could be attributable.  We must, therefore, seek for some other way of accounting for the sticks—which utterly puzzled us, and which Mr. Manross well describes as ‘numerous pieces of wood which, being involved in the pitch, are constantly coming to the surface.  They are often several feet in length, and five or six inches in diameter.  On caching the surface they generally assume an upright position, one end being detained in the pitch, while the other is elevated by the lifting of the middle.  They may be seen at frequent intervals over the lake, standing up to the height of two or even three feet.  They look like stumps of trees protruding through the pitch; but their parvenu character is curiously betrayed by a ragged cap of pitch which invariably covers the top, and hangs down like hounds’ ears on either side.’

Whence do they come?  Have they been blown on to the lake, or left behind by man? or are they fossil trees, integral parts of the vegetable stratum below which is continually rolling upward? or are they of both kinds?  I do not know.  Only this is certain, as Messrs. Wall and Sawkins have pointed out, that not only ‘the purer varieties of asphalt, such as approach or are identical with asphalt glance, have been observed’ (though not, I think, in the lake itself) ‘in isolated masses, where there was little doubt of their proceeding from ligneous substances of larger dimensions, such as roots and pieces of trunks and branches;’ but moreover, that ‘it is also necessary to admit a species of conversion by contact; since pieces of wood included accidentally in the asphalt, for example, by dropping from overhanging vegetation, are often found partially transformed into the material.’  This is a statement which we verified again and again; as we did the one which follows, namely, that the hollow bubbles which abound on the surface of the pitch ‘generally contain traces of the lighter portions of vegetation,’ and ‘are manifestly derived from leaves, etc., which are blown about the lake by the wind, and are covered with asphalt, and as they become asphalt themselves, give off gases, which form bubbles round them.’

But how is it that those logs stand up out of the asphalt, with asphalt caps and hounds’ ears (as Mr. Manross well phrases it) on the tops of them?

We pushed on across the lake, over the planks which the Negroes laid down from island to island.  Some, meanwhile, preferred a steeple-chase with water-jumps, after the fashion of the midshipmen on a certain second visit to the lake.  How the Negroes grinned delight and surprise at the vagaries of English lads—a species of animal altogether new to them.  And how they grinned still more when certain staid and portly dignitaries caught the infection, and proved, by more than one good leap, that they too had been English schoolboys—alas! long, long ago.

So, whether by bridging, leaping, or wading, we arrived at last at the little islands, and found them covered with a thick, low scrub; deep sedge, and among them Pinguins, like huge pine-apples without the apple; gray wild Pines—parasites on Matapalos, which of course have established themselves, like robbers and vagrants as they are, everywhere; a true Holly, with box-like leaves; and a rare Cocoa-plum, 144 very like the holly in habit, which seems to be all but confined to these little patches of red earth, afloat on the pitch.  Out of the scrub, when we were there, flew off two or three night-jars, very like our English species, save that they had white in the wings; and on the second visit, one of the midshipmen, true to the English boy’s birds’-nesting instinct, found one of their eggs, white-spotted, in a grass nest.

Passing these little islands, which are said (I know not how truly) to change their places and number, we came to the very fountains of Styx, to that part of the lake where the asphalt is still oozing up.

As the wind set toward us, we soon became aware of an evil smell—petroleum and sulphuretted hydrogen at once—which gave some of us a headache.  The pitch here is yellow and white with sulphur foam; so are the water-channels; and out of both water and pitch innumerable bubbles of gas arise, loathsome to the smell.  We became aware also that the pitch was soft under our feet.  We left the impression of our boots; and if we had stood still awhile, we should soon have been ankle-deep.  No doubt there are spots where, if a man stayed long enough, he would be slowly and horribly engulfed.  ‘But,’ as Mr. Manross says truly, ‘in no place is it possible to form those bowl-like depressions round the observer described by former travellers.’  What we did see is, that the fresh pitch oozes out at the lines of least resistance, namely, in the channels between the older and more hardened masses, usually at the upper ends of them; so that one may stand on pitch comparatively hard, and put one’s hand into pitch quite liquid, which is flowing softly out, like some ugly fungoid growth, such as may be seen in old wine-cellars, into the water.  One such pitch-fungus had grown several yards in length in the three weeks between our first and second visit; and on another, some of our party performed exactly the same feat as Mr. Manross—

‘In one of the star-shaped pools of water, some five feet deep, a column of pitch had been forced perpendicularly up from the bottom.  On reaching the surface of the water it had formed a sort of centre table, about four feet in diameter, but without touching the sides of the pool.  The stem was about a foot in diameter.  I leaped out on this table, and found that it not only sustained my weight, but that the elasticity of the stem enabled me to rock it from side to side.  Pieces torn from the edges of this table sank readily, showing that it had been raised by pressure, and not by its buoyancy.’

True, though strange: but stranger still did it seem to us, when we did at last what the Negroes asked us, and dipped our hands into the liquid pitch, to find that it did not soil the fingers.  The old proverb, that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled, happily does not stand true here, or the place would be intolerably loathsome.  It can be scraped up, moulded into any shape you will; wound in a string (as was done by one of the midshipmen) round a stick, and carried off: but nothing is left on the hand save clean gray mud and water.  It may be kneaded for an hour before the mud be sufficiently driven out of it to make it sticky.  This very abundance of earthy matter it is which, while it keeps the pitch from soiling, makes it far less valuable than it would be were it pure.

It is easy to understand whence this earthy matter (twenty or thirty per cent) comes.  Throughout the neighbourhood the ground is full, to the depth of hundreds of feet, of coaly and asphaltic matter.  Layers of sandstone or of shale containing this decayed vegetable, alternate with layers which contain none.  And if, as seems probable, the coaly matter is continually changing into asphalt and oil, and then working its way upward through every crack and pore, to escape from the enormous pressure of the superincumbent soil, it must needs carry up with it innumerable particles of the soils through which it passes.

In five minutes we had seen, handled, and smelt enough to satisfy us with this very odd and very nasty vagary of tropic nature; and as we did not wish to become faint and ill, between the sulphuretted hydrogen and the blaze of the sun reflected off the hot black pitch, we hurried on over the water-furrows, and through the sedge-beds to the farther shore—to find ourselves in a single step out of an Inferno into a Paradiso.

We looked back at the foul place, and agreed that it is well for the human mind that the Pitch Lake was still unknown when Dante wrote that hideous poem of his—the opprobrium (as I hold) of the Middle Age.  For if such were the dreams of its noblest and purest genius, what must have been the dreams of the ignoble and impure multitude?  But had he seen this lake, how easy, how tempting too, it would have been to him to embody in imagery the surmise of a certain ‘Father,’ and heighten the torments of the lost beings, sinking slowly into that black Bolge beneath the baking rays of the tropic sun, by the sight of the saved, walking where we walked, beneath cool fragrant shade, among the pillars of a temple to which the Parthenon is mean and small.

Sixty feet and more aloft, the short smooth columns of the Moriches 145 towered around us, till, as we looked through the ‘pillared shade,’ the eye was lost in the green abysses of the forest.  Overhead, their great fan leaves form a groined roof, compared with which that of St. Mary Redcliff, or even of King’s College, is as clumsy as all man’s works are beside the works of God; and beyond the Moriche wood, ostrich plumes packed close round madder-brown stems, formed a wall to our temple, which bore such tracery, carving, painting, as would have stricken dumb with awe and delight him who ornamented the Loggie of the Vatican.  True, all is ‘still-life’ here: no human forms, hardly even that of a bird, is mixed with the vegetable arabesques.  A higher state of civilisation, ages after we are dead, may introduce them, and complete the scene by peopling it with a race worthy of it.  But the Creator, at least, has done His part toward producing perfect beauty, all the more beautiful from its contrast with the ugliness outside.  For the want of human beings fit for all that beauty, man is alone to blame; and when we saw approach us, as the only priest of such a temple, a wild brown man, who feeds his hogs on Moriche fruit and Mombin plums, and whose only object was to sell us an ant-eater’s skin, we thought to ourselves—knowing the sad history of the West Indies—what might this place have become, during the three hundred and fifty years which have elapsed since Columbus first sailed round it, had men—calling themselves Christian, calling themselves civilised—possessed any tincture of real Christianity, of real civilisation?  What a race, of mingled Spaniard and Indian, might have grown up throughout the West Indies.  What a life, what a society, what an art, what a science it might have developed ere now, equalling, even surpassing, that of Ionia, Athens, and Sicily, till the famed isles and coasts of Greece should have been almost forgotten in the new fame of the isles and coasts of the Caribbean Sea.

What might not have happened, had men but tried to copy their Father in heaven?  What has happened is but too well known, since, in July 1498, Columbus, coming hither, fancied (and not so wrongly) that he had come to the ‘base of the Earthly Paradise.’

What might not have been made, with something of justice and mercy, common sense and humanity, of these gentle Arawaks and Guaraons.  What was made of them, almost ere Columbus was dead, may be judged from this one story, taken from Las Casas:—146

‘There was a certain man named Juan Bono, who was employed by the members of the Audiencia of St. Domingo to go and obtain Indians.  He and his men, to the number of fifty or sixty, landed on the Island of Trinidad.  Now the Indians of Trinidad were a mild, loving, credulous race, the enemies of the Caribs, who ate human flesh.  On Juan Bono’s landing, the Indians, armed with bows and arrows, went to meet the Spaniards, and to ask them who they were, and what they wanted.  Juan Bono replied, that his crew were good and peaceful people, who had come to live with the Indians; upon which, as the commencement of good fellowship, the natives offered to build houses for the Spaniards.  The Spanish captain expressed a wish to have one large house built.  The accommodating Indians set about building it.  It was to be in the form of a bell, and to be large enough for a hundred persons to live in.  On any great occasion it would hold many more.  Every day, while this house was being built, the Spaniards were fed with fish, bread, and fruit by their good-natured hosts.  Juan Bono was very anxious to see the roof on, and the Indians continued to work at the building with alacrity.  At last it was completed, being two storeys high, and so constructed that those within could not see those without.  Upon a certain day, Juan Bono collected the Indians together—men, women, and children—in the building, “to see,” as he told them, “what was to be done.”

‘Whether they thought they were coming to some festival, or that they were to do something more for the great house, does not appear.  However, there they all were, four hundred of them, looking with much delight at their own handiwork.  Meanwhile, Juan Bono brought his men round the building, with drawn swords in their hands; then, having thoroughly entrapped his Indian friends, he entered with a party of armed men and bade the Indians keep still, or he would kill them.  They did not listen to him, but rushed to the door.  A horrible massacre ensued.  Some of the Indians forced their way out; but many of them, stupefied at what they saw, and losing heart, were captured and bound.  A hundred, however, escaped, and snatching up their arms, assembled in one of their own houses, and prepared to defend themselves.  Juan Bono summoned them to surrender: they would not hear of it; and then, as Las Casas says, “he resolved to pay them completely for the hospitality and kind treatment he had received,” and so, setting fire to the house, the whole hundred men, together with some women and children, were burnt alive.  The Spanish captain and his men retired to the ships with their captives; and his vessel happening to touch at Porto Rico, when the Jeronimite Fathers were there, gave occasion to Las Casas to complain of this proceeding to the Fathers, who, however, did nothing in the way of remedy or punishment.  The reader will be surprised to hear the Clerigo’s authority for this deplorable narrative.  It is Juan Bono himself.  “From his own mouth I heard that which I write.”  Juan Bono acknowledged that never in his life had he met with the kindness of father or mother but in the island of Trinidad.  “Well, then, man of perdition, why did you reward them with such ungrateful wickedness and cruelty?”—“On my faith, padre, because they (he meant the Auditors) gave me for destruction (he meant instruction) to take them in peace, if I could not by war.”’

Such was the fate of the poor gentle folk who for unknown ages had swung their hammocks to the stems of these Moriches, spinning the skin of the young leaves into twine, and making sago from the pith, and thin wine from the sap and fruit, while they warned their children not to touch the nests of the humming-birds, which even till lately swarmed around the lake.  For—so the Indian story ran—once on a time a tribe of Chaymas built their palm-leaf ajoupas upon the very spot where the lake now lies, and lived a merry life.  The sea swarmed with shellfish and turtle, and the land with pine-apples; the springs were haunted by countless flocks of flamingoes and horned screamers, pajuis and blue ramiers; and, above all, by humming-birds.  But the foolish Chaymas were blind to the mystery and the beauty of the humming-birds, and would not understand how they were no other than the souls of dead Indians, translated into living jewels; and so they killed them in wantonness, and angered ‘The Good Spirit.’  But one morning, when the Guaraons came by, the Chayma village had sunk deep into the earth, and in its place had risen this lake of pitch.  So runs the tale, told some forty years since to M. Joseph, author of a clever little history of Trinidad, by an old half-caste Indian, Señor Trinidada by name, who was said then to be nigh one hundred years of age.

Surely the people among whom such a myth could spring up, were worthy of a nobler fate.  Surely there were in them elements of ‘sweetness and light,’ which might have been cultivated to some fine fruit, had there been anything like sweetness and light in their first conquerors—the offscourings, not of Spain and Portugal only, but of Germany, Italy, and, indeed, almost every country in Europe.  The present Spanish landowners of Trinidad, be it remembered always, do not derive from those old ruffians, but from noble and ancient families, who settled in the island during the seventeenth century, bringing with them a Spanish grace, Spanish simplicity, and Spanish hospitality, which their descendants have certainly not lost.  Were it my habit to ‘put people into books,’ I would gladly tell in these pages of charming days spent in the company of Spanish ladies and gentlemen.  But I shall only hint here at the special affection and respect with which they—and, indeed, the French Creoles likewise—are regarded by Negro and by Indian.

For there are a few Indians remaining in the northern mountains, and specially at Arima—simple hamlet-folk, whom you can distinguish, at a glance, from mulattoes or quadroons, by the tawny complexion, and by a shape of eye, and length between the eye and the mouth, difficult to draw, impossible to describe, but discerned instantly by any one accustomed to observe human features.  Many of them, doubtless, have some touch of Negro blood, and are the offspring of ‘Cimarons’—‘Maroons,’ as they are still called in Jamaica.  These Cimarons were Negroes who, even in the latter half of the sixteenth century (as may be read in the tragical tale of John Oxenham, given in Hakluyt’s Voyages), had begun to flee from their cruel masters into the forests, both in the Islands and in the Main.  There they took to themselves Indian wives, who preferred them, it is said, to men of their own race, and lived a jolly hunter’s life, slaying with tortures every Spaniard who fell into their hands.  Such, doubtless, haunted the northern Cerros of Tocuche, Aripo, and Oropuche, and left some trace of themselves among the Guaraons.  Spanish blood, too, runs notoriously in the veins of some of the Indians of the island; and the pure race here is all but vanished.  But out of these three elements has arisen a race of cacao-growing mountaineers as simple and gentle, as loyal and peaceable, as any in Her Majesty’s dominions.  Dignified, courteous, hospitable, according to their little means, they salute the white Senor without defiance and without servility, and are delighted if he will sit in their clay and palm ajoupas, and eat oranges and Malacca apples 147 from their own trees, on their own freehold land.

They preserve, too, the old Guaraon arts of weaving baskets and other utensils, pretty enough, from the strips of the Aruma leaves.  From them the Negro, who will not, or cannot, equal them in handicraft, buys the pack in which wares are carried on the back, and the curious strainer in which the Cassava is deprived of its poisonous juice.  So cleverly are the fibres twisted, that when the strainer is hung up, with a stone weight at the lower end, the diameter of the strainer decreases as its length increases, and the juice is squeezed out through the pores to drip into a calabash, and, nowadays, to be thrown carefully away, lest children or goats should drink it.  Of old, it was kept with care and dried down to a gum, and used to poison arrows, as it is still used, I believe, on the Orinoco; now, its poisonous properties are expelled by boiling it down into Cassaripe, which has a singular power of preserving meat, and is the foundation of the ‘pepperpot’ of the colonists.

And this is all that remains of the once beautiful, deft, and happy Indians of Trinidad, unless, indeed, some of them, warned by the fate of the Indians of San Josef and the Northern Mountains, fled from such tyrants as Juan Bono and Berreo across the Gulf of Paria, and, rejoining their kinsmen on the mainland, gladly forgot the sight of that Cross which was to them the emblem, not of salvation, but of destruction.